PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING FILM CRITIC SET STANDARD WITH A ‘GOLDEN THUMB’

With a twist of his wrist, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic rendered decisions that influenced a nation of moviegoers and could sometimes make or break a film.

The heavyset writer in the horn-rimmed glasses teamed up on television with Gene Siskel to create a format for criticism that proved enormously appealing in its simplicity: uncomplicated reviews both intelligent and accessible and didn’t talk down to ordinary movie fans.

Ebert, film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967, died Thursday at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, two days after announcing on his blog that he was undergoing radiation treatment for a recurrence of cancer. He was 70.

“So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I’ll see you at the movies.” Ebert blogged Tuesday.

Despite his wide influence, Ebert considered himself “beneath everything else a fan.”

“I have seen untold numbers of movies and forgotten most of them, I hope, but I remember those worth remembering, and they are all on the same shelf in my mind,” Ebert wrote in his 2011 memoir titled “Life Itself.”

After cancer surgeries in 2006, Ebert lost portions of his jaw and the ability to eat, drink and speak. But he went back to writing full time and returned to television. In addition to his work for the Sun-Times, he became a prolific user of social media, connecting with hundreds of thousands of fans on Facebook and Twitter. Ebert’s thumb — pointing up or down — was his trademark. It was the main logo of the long-running TV shows Ebert co-hosted, first with Siskel of the rival Chicago Tribune and — after Siskel’s death in 1999 — with Sun-Times colleague Richard Roeper. A “two thumbs up” accolade was sure to find its way into the advertising for the movie in question.

The nation’s best-known movie reviewer “wrote with passion through a real knowledge of film and film history, and in doing so, helped many movies find their audiences,” director Steven Spielberg said. His death is “virtually the end of an era, and now the balcony is closed forever.”

President Barack Obama said in a statement that “Roger was the movies. When he didn’t like a film, he was honest; when he did, he was effusive — capturing the unique power of the movies to take us somewhere magical … The movies won’t be the same without Roger …”

“The lasting legacy of what Roger was able to do was that he dealt with art, schlock and everything in between in such a way as to make everybody more alert to the possibilities of cinema,” said Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Phillips, a former San Diego Union-Tribune theater and movie reviewer. He was befriended by Ebert in 2006, when both covered France’s Cannes film festival. “For many people, Roger was the quintessential Chicagoan, more than Michael Jordan, Oprah (Winfrey) or (Mayor) Rahm Emanuel,” noted Philips, who in 2008 began substituting for the ailing Ebert on “At the Movies.”